bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog

Archive for June, 2009

The stretch of Borough High Street between the excellent but now derelict chip shop and the George Inn is where I first realised I was poor, when homeless people stopped asking me for spare change at London Bridge tube station. Being ignored by beggers is pretty disheartening, I can tell you. For a while, I thought I might have become a ghost.

Anyway. I was wheeling stock past the Post Office there last Friday, when a homeless bloke unexpectedly offered me a fight. I give thirty five quid a month to a homeless charity, which presented a dilemma, as I wasn’t sure whether this meant that I should have a fight with him, on the basis that I have effectively paid an entrace fee of sorts, or that I shouldn’t, on the basis that one of the many things that violence probably won’t solve is the issue of rough sleeping in London. Also, fighting a tramp would be difficult as their major componant is stain – this particular one was in effect a bearded stain in a jacket – which may well give them some kind of special combat skill, possibly shapeshifting, and you’d have to be careful in case you got bitten.

[Getting drunk and rowdy with Read More now will reveal classic but defunct scrapping and brawling phrases]

At Greenwich, I trade very near a bloke who sells hand cream which smells of roses. This is not in itself remarkable – the average rose presumably smells nicer than the average hand – however he says ‘Would you like some hand cream, madam?’ to every single female who passes by, and after a few hours of this, it sounds like he is saying ‘Do you have a hankering, madam?’ which is hardly the sort of question you ask a lady on a summer’s morning.

I look after his stall quite often, and yesterday I used a discarded child’s doll to demonstrate the rejuvenating effects of his hand cream by saying ‘Yeah be careful with that stuff though – this lady used it every day for a year, and instead of being forty six, she’s now four months old, which is awkward as she’s the shadow home secretary’, and so on. Looking after other peoples’ stalls is always quite a larf, and makes a bit of a change from, at Camden anyway, having to spend more time than you might imagine explaining t shirts to people. There really is only so many times you can enjoy people saying to you ‘Yeah, sorry, this t shirt you have here, how can a dolphin be a gay shark? They’re different animals’ or ‘Yeah sorry, why has that Bono t shirt got Twat written across it?’ and so on. Often I would either pretend that I didn’t speak English or that it wasn’t my stall or just say “How odd, I hadn’t noticed that was hanging there, and now you come to mention it, I don’t understand it either.’

[Hitting Read More now will reveal widespread point missing on behalf of the general public]